


Five Ways Mitchell Found Out About O'Neill and Jackson

by Paian



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: 10000-30000 words, 5 Things, Alien Planet, Aliens Make Them Do It, Birthday, Dinner, Future Fic, M/M, POV Male Character, POV Outsider, Season/Series 09, Season/Series 09-10, Team
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-05-04
Updated: 2007-05-03
Packaged: 2017-10-03 02:50:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 11,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paian/pseuds/Paian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Through the grapevine; by observation; from Jackson; from Vala; from O'Neill.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Through the Grapevine

_(three months before the battle over Antarctica)_

"Guess that training paid off," Galloway said, swinging a slap-and-squeeze at Mitchell's shoulder while they waited for the losing teams to form up for the hike back to the clubhouse and the showers. "You're an animal, Shaft. They had no chance."

It was true, and it pissed Mitchell off. Bunch of intelligence operatives were the best Galloway could come up with? He'd come out here looking to test himself, but when Galloway promised him a good time what he apparently meant was "twenty asses you can kick handcuffed and blindfolded," not "four good teams who'll give us a run for our money."

Mitchell had bushwhacked through three jungles' worth of bureaucratic tape and used up two years of leave to get himself the special-operations training that none of his immediate superiors agreed there was any need for him to have. He didn't tell anyone why he wanted it and he didn't tell anyone what kept him going when it tried to kill him, because in his experience admitting your most fondly cherished dreams was a good way to put the kibosh on them, never mind all the ways it made you vulnerable to every asshole with a mouthful of sour grapes. From the moment he qualified in an F-302 and learned about the Stargate Program, all he wanted was a shot at getting onto one of those teams. And for that he knew he'd need to qualify in ground ops. Forget qualify; _over_qualify. He'd become the best pilot he could possibly be, and he was damn proud of it -- but he wanted more, and so he went out and got the occupational certs he was going to need if his golden opportunity ever came.

He'd also ordered every book that had ever been written about the special-operations community and every ground-based operational tactics and strategies manual and downloaded every West Point syllabus he could get access to (and a bunch he wasn't supposed to). He'd provided himself the best textbook education he could and pushed himself to get that black belt in aikido and doubled his hours on the range even when it meant going short on sleep. He'd read every SGC report authorized for his level of clearance, and dreamed of getting clearance to read them all. He especially wanted to see all the SG-1 mission reports. He yearned for it with a tactile desire to hold oaktag and manila in his hands, run his thumb over the staples at the tops of folders, the way he'd yearned for the next month's comic book as a kid, the smooth coating of the cover under his fingers, the rough newsprint inside, the smell of the ink, the promise of unimaginable adventures. He knew it was a pipe dream and he didn't care. You want what you want, and he wanted this.

Being a fighter pilot had been a dream, once. Going into space had been a dream, once. He'd prepared for those as well as he was able, and when his shot had come he'd been ready. He'd do no less for this.

Even if it meant keeping his skills sharp playing freakin' paintball.

He snapped the elastic around the barrel sock on his weapon, trying to lose what Gram called his sourball mouth before he turned and raised his head. Then he said, to Galloway and the rest of his team, "Asses were resoundingly kicked, my friends. Good job." Borowski, Simpson, Lewis -- no reason they shouldn't savor the thrill of victory. They were stand-up guys, and they were zoomies the FBI team should have had for lunch. This might be the only time they escaped elimination. Their regular team leader would be back from deployment next week, and Mitchell would be looking for something a little more challenging.

FBI, CIA, NID, NSA -- the alphabet soup of other teams were assembling around them now, and there was handshaking and backslapping and good-natured ribbing, and it was all good, Mitchell thought; they'd hit the showers, grab beers in the hunting club's taproom, shoot the shit and spend a pleasant couple of hours bonding across branches of service. He was sorry this hadn't been what he was looking for. He'd feel bad using the contacts he'd made here today to put feelers out to other clubs, see if he could get an in with some marines or infantry, maybe even local SWAT who liked to take a busman's holiday once a month. It wasn't that these guys were bad -- just with the exception of two guys on the FBI team with live tactical experience they were all _sportsmen_. Mitchell already had his game on. He needed to get out in the woods with some guys who'd have a shot at actually killing him in live combat, some guys who might be able to teach him something, and these guys weren't those guys. They didn't have to be, in their line of work. They were still good guys. Surprisingly good guys, for spooks.

Yeah, well, with a couple of exceptions. Two members of the NID team were hanging back, messing with their gear off to the side, oozing resentment. Mitchell hesitated; he was a guest here, and he'd beaten them, and they were looking pretty pissed about it, and the good sportsmanship of going over to shake hands wasn't looking to sit real well. But if he nipped this in the bud now, everybody'd have a lot nicer time back at the clubhouse. So he went over and stuck his hand out.

The taller of the two guys took it, and pulled as he pushed in to get right in Mitchell's face. "I checked up on you," he said, and if Mitchell had seen the burn in his eyes from back at fifteen feet he'd have dealt with this a lot differently, but it was done now, he was here. "You're angling for a place on an SG team."

"I'm a 302 squadron leader," Mitchell said calmly, the equivalent of reciting name-rank-service-number.

"Who's ordered an interesting assortment of irrelevant reading material, and collected some occupational badges no pilot should have any interest in." The guy's name patch read BURDICK \-- _emphasis on the "dick,"_ Mitchell thought. He was trying for a crushing grip on Mitchell's hand, and Mitchell's hand wasn't giving.

"I'm just a regular Renaissance man," Mitchell said. "Whaddya gonna do."

"I can see that you never get within spitting distance of that mountain," Burdick said. "Pull a string here, whisper in an ear there, and you're deployed out of a cold, cold place for the rest of your career."

"Aw, hell, man, I'm up for rotation to McMurdo in six weeks. You wanna threaten me over a game of tag, you're gonna have to do a lot better'n that."

In fact, his belly had become a cold, cold place, because once somebody had figured out what you wanted, they had a way to get at you, and this NID guy had figured out what he wanted, and this NID guy was a dick. Mitchell had seen psychopathically sore losers like this hold grudges for years over one penny-ante poker game.

The other guy, Owen, stepped in close, and for a split second it looked like he was going to rein his buddy in. "Not worth it, Len," he said -- and then, in response to the burning look of betrayal Len shot him, he smiled and said, silky soft, stomach-turning soft, too softly for anyone but the three of them to hear, "He's just a pretty face looking to be another O'Neill cabana boy."

_That's the dangerous one,_ Mitchell thought, and _Don't do it, play it cool,_ and _They're NID not military it's just a joke to them nobody else heard let it go_ \-- and then he'd pivoted to take Burdick's legs out from under him in a sweep, shoved him down and out of the way and slammed Owen back against the nearest tree with a forearm to the throat that kept him from tucking his chin and made stars swim in his eyes from the impact of his skull on the bark.

"That's not the kind of thing we joke about in my branch of service," Mitchell said, very quietly, under the "Hey!"s and "Yo!"s and heavy bootsteps of the other guys moving in to break it up.

"Not a joke," Owen rasped.

"I don't care if he's queer as a Yankee dollar, talk like that could ruin a man."

"Yes it could," Owen said, in a very different voice, and much lower, though no less raspy. "Especially since it's true." Something about the way his eyes held Mitchell's kept Mitchell from throwing an elbow into Burdick's gut when he felt the other guy come up and lay hands on his shoulders.

Mitchell tried to shake him off but not too hard, and Burdick put a loose chokehold on him and said, very fast and low into Mitchell's ear, "I'll be in your backseat after beers, you want to help protect him I'll tell you how, now give me that elbow."

Mitchell threw the elbow, medium hard, and Burdick fell away from him doubled over and gasping, and then his own guys were pulling him off Owen, who let out a string of sullen, hoarse obscenities and walked away rubbing his throat.

Over beers in the clubhouse, Owen and Burdick kept a wary, resentful distance, tossing insults in a couple of halfhearted feints he took Galloway's advice and didn't rise to. Burdick drank way too much too fast and eventually stumbled out into the parking lot to upchuck, and after a while Owen went after him. When social time was over and everybody got in their cars to leave, Owen's car was already gone and they figured he'd taken Burdick home. But Burdick was lying in the backseat of Mitchell's Mustang, cold sober and eating a candy bar.

"Nice ride," he said, when Mitchell was buckled in. "Drive. Put the radio on."

Mitchell put the radio on and drove. "Sure hope I'm not gonna find any broken locks when I get out."

"Nope," Burdick said, sitting up and draping himself on the back of Mitchell's seat. "Now here's how you can help, if you're so inclined."

After he heard what Burdick had to say, he was so inclined, but only after he figured out how to use his own contacts to satisfy himself that it was the truth -- and acquired a stake by identifying some leaks he wouldn't want anybody else stepping in to plug.

It wasn't the kind of training Mitchell would ever have gone looking for -- the art of spreading disinformation, counterintelligence, neutralizing unsubstantiated rumors that happened to be true with subtle, well-targeted falsehoods and red herrings, covert ops as the Air Force mole of two NID agents who'd gone rogue within their own bureau because they didn't like the hit Kinsey had put out on the reputation of a man and the integrity of a team and a program they believed were the planet's best defense against what was Out There. But it was training from some of the best in the world, and whatever their differences were and whatever they thought of each other, they shared one thing in common: they would protect SG-1 no matter what and at all costs.

Keeping the political wolves' teeth from finding the SGC's Achilles heel -- the relationship between Colonel O'Neill and Daniel Jackson -- turned out to be the most challenging and deadly earnest round of paintball he'd ever play.


	2. By Observation

_(five months into his command of SG-1)_

They were out at O'Malley's celebrating Cassandra Fraiser's twentieth birthday -- Mitchell and Carter on one side of the table, O'Neill and Jackson on the other, Teal'c and Cassandra at either end. Mitchell had been in the military for seventeen years and part of a close-knit family all his life. He knew that he wasn't here just to fill the table out. He was here to take the Cassie Test.

Every family had a Cassie Test. In his family it was the Grandma Test, in his first girlfriend's it was the Nephews Test; in his service buddy Ferguson's it was the Flaky Aunt Rachel (She's Weird but We Love Her and She's Got a Nose for People) Test. In his high school buddy Darrell's it was, unfathomably, the Darrell Test. Darrell _was_ the test -- he was usually off at school and practice, he was the member of the family that you didn't always get to meet right away, but if you spent enough time hanging around, eventually they'd sit you down at a meal with him, and if he didn't like you the rest of them would never really embrace you. Mitchell'd had girlfriends who didn't pass the Grandma Test, and it always turned out for the best in the end. There'd been a girl he was sure would pass the Grandma Test and he never got to find out and he never got over that.

He passed the Cassie Test before the appetizers came. She was smitten to the point of shyness on first sight, and then got interested in his Academy stories (she'd be graduating in June) and forgot that he was cute and started listening (he didn't even have to pull out any of the embarrassing ones about Carter), and by the time the shrimp cocktails arrived they were having a spirited discussion about hazing rituals and the whole table had joined in and everybody seemed to be having a fine old time, Cassie most of all.

The thing was, once the meal itself started, he started noticing definite oddnesses. He'd kept a weather eye on O'Neill -- couldn't help it when there was a general at the table, off-duty or not, and he was curious about O'Neill, hadn't really spent a lot of time with the guy all told and no time in any informal setting that wasn't his own hospital room -- and what he kept seeing was as strange as nobody else at the table seeming to see it at all.

The general snatched up the shrimp tails Jackson discarded as he dropped them, cracked their remaining shell off and smeared them through the sauce on Jackson's plate and popped them in his mouth with Jackson taking no notice at all. When their entrees came, first thing O'Neill did was reach across and snag the ketchup to put in front of Jackson's plate, and first thing Jackson did was cut the fat off his chops and dump it on the general's plate, without missing a beat in his back-and-forth with Carter. The general kept Jackson's water glass filled, and periodically swapped it with Jackson's beer glass, and Jackson just kept reaching for whichever glass was by his right hand and drinking from that.

They'd served together for a lot of years. He knew that. He knew firsthand how your squadron became your family, how you took care of each other and learned to anticipate each other's needs and preferences without even thinking about it. But he'd eaten a lot of meals with this team and nobody messed with anybody else's plate or drinks. He'd once seen Carter try to sneak a fry off Jackson's plate and nearly lose a finger to his fork. O'Neill was cattycorner from Teal'c and sure as hell wasn't cadging from his food.

Yeah, he knew that Jackson and O'Neill had known each other before Carter and Teal'c came on the scene, had gone on a life-changing, history-making mission together. He'd heard the old-married-couple jokes, but he'd heard those about plenty of other guys he'd served around, he'd seen the same closeness and snark and oblivious cooperation between men, between women, between men and women ... and there was something juuuuust a little different about this.

There was something a lot different about this. He hadn't got such a strong partner vibe off anyone he'd had dinner with since he met Bryce Ferguson's parents. They'd been married and running a business together for thirty years, and even after growing up in a family full of role models and solid relationships, Mitchell had looked at them and thought, _Man, I hope I have something half as good as that someday_.

There was something about the way Jackson groped over to grab a fistful of O'Neill's blazer at the shoulder when Teal'c had said something that made them all laugh hard enough to bring tears to their eyes. There was something about the way they sat extra close on their side of the table, even though they were no closer than Mitchell was to Carter on his side. There was something about the way they moved in smooth synchrony without even looking at each other, and a big something about the way they looked at each other when they did. All the SG-1 team members finished each other's sentences, hell he'd been doing it himself for a couple of months now, but with O'Neill and Jackson it wasn't just group-mind teaminess; it was like they were the left and right sides of the same brain. O'Neill would start a sentence and Jackson would finish it to mean exactly the opposite of what O'Neill had clearly started out to say, and O'Neill would turn right around and do it back. They had _intrasentence_ arguments, settled in strings of dependent clauses, and entire conversations that consisted of nothing but the word "what" or each other's names. It was uncanny. It was ... well, kind of beautiful. And it was freaking his shit out.

Add in the body language and the eyetalking and the vibe, and you got a picture Mitchell had to stuff in the triple-sealed MILITARY NEVER EVER GETS WIND OF THIS folder in the backest back of his head.

He spent the rest of the meal ignoring it, tuning it out. It was no chore to focus even more on Cassandra, who was a remarkable young woman and was going to make a hell of an officer a lot sooner than anybody at this table was ready for. He let himself relax enough to rib Carter the way they used to rib each other as cadets, and be ribbed back without getting his dander up, and not feel like he was screwing with the team dynamic by letting loose a little bit with his old buddy, a worry he hadn't even known had been nagging at him all this time, making him stiffen up, be more tense than he was, as if it was OK for the three of them to go way back but not OK for him and Carter to go a whole lot wayer back than that. Finally, when it was getting around time to think about dessert, he told the story of how Carter passed the Grandma Test at his family's old Tennessee house, winter break when they were doolies, and Carter pulled out all her old "gram test" jokes, and then everybody at the table had to have a shot at the pun. When the double entendres finally petered out, Cassie looked at him, a startlingly affectionate and penetrating look, and said, "I think you passed, too, Colonel Mitchell."

He gave her a gracious nod, and laid on his thickest drawl to reply, "Well, thanks for the thumbs-up, ma'am. I surely do appreciate it."

Her head cocked, her eyebrow went up a hair, and then she laughed -- a mysterious, enchanting laugh that was destined to break more poor bastards' hearts than Mitchell wanted to think about. "Wow," she said, and then she called down the table, "Teal'c, help me pick some tunes we can, like, _stand_?"

Teal'c rose, saying, "Most gladly. I am finding Deborah Harry more than tiresome."

While Teal'c escorted Cassie, on his arm, over to the jukebox, O'Neill got up too, saying, "Excuse me, folks, gotta shed a tear for my country," and executed a series of stealth-like maneuvers to get to the waiters' station and buttonhole the manager without Cassie seeing him do it. Then Jackson got up, saying, "I actually _do_ have to take a leak," and then it was just Mitchell and Carter at the table, and she turned to him with a beaming smile he hadn't seen in a long time.

"You have no idea what just happened, do you," she said.

"I thought I just passed the Cassie Test," he said. "And I don't mind tellin' ya, I am _damn_ proud of myself."

"You did," she said, nodding, "and you should be, she's not an easy touch even if you are the prettiest boy in the Springs," but her eyes were still twinkling and he was still obviously missing something.

"OK," he said, drawing the syllables out, and summarized what he knew. "Cassie just manufactured an excuse to get herself away from the table so that O'Neill could surprise her with a cake and candles, Teal'c really does hate Blondie and jumped on the chance to see if there's any classic rock on that juke, and Jackson really did have to take a leak. So ... " He raised his eyebrows, spread his hands. "What'd I miss?"

"Not a thing," she said, "and that's the point."

He looked at her for a long time, until he could see in her eyes that she saw in his eyes that he was getting it, and then he realized what it was.

O'Neill and Jackson didn't behave around just anyone the way they'd behaved tonight. O'Neill and Jackson only behaved that way around family.

"This was deliberate?" he said.

She shrugged. "No idea. Maybe they let down their guard unconsciously, which means they already trusted you. More likely they made a show of it on purpose to see what you'd do. Either way, you did exactly what you were supposed to. You noticed, you were surprised, you hid it well, you filed the information and you moved on." She slapped his shoulder, left her hand there, squeezed, gave a rough little shake. "You're in, Cam. Congratulations."

He let out a long whistle to release a breath he hadn't realized he was holding. "And I thought I had my work cut out passing muster with the kid."

"Oh, believe me," Sam said, "you did. Now here they come. Help her convince the general she didn't know about the cake and you'll have a friend for life, he's an insufferable surprise whore and he'll sulk all year if we blow this."

When the waitstaff came bearing the candle-bedecked cake and the whole restaurant took up the "Happy Birthday" song, Mitchell gave Cassie a wide-eyed, open-mouthed, delighted-surprise face to bounce her own "ohmygod they remembered my birthday!" expression off of, and the weather eye he kept on the general logged warm, smug satisfaction. Cake-and-coffee was relaxed and happy and full of laughter, and "Magic Carpet Ride" followed Mariah Carey's "We Belong Together" on the jukebox, and the celebration wound down slow and satisfying the way the best ones always did.

At the end, when they were walking out, O'Neill threw his arm around Jackson's shoulders, and yeah it looked for all the world like a buddy throwing his arm around a buddy's shoulders, but Mitchell could see the truth in it now. He could feel the change in his own perspective, in his own eyeballs, a clearing of vision like a physical thing, like blinking and getting some blurry gunk out of his eyes. He knew that all the strangers around them, the military personnel from Peterson and the Academy, the suburban cowboys and college students, saw the garrulous affection a guy with a few beers in him and caffeine laid down on top of it showers on a buddy. But Mitchell's eyes had a different focus now, and when O'Neill gave his back a slap in the parking lot before he got into the passenger side of Jackson's car, Mitchell knew that it wasn't a cover. It wasn't O'Neill paying manly attention to him to make it seem like he was spreading it around.

O'Neill could read the change in the way he saw, and O'Neill could suss that he was cool with what he saw. O'Neill wasn't just congratulating him for making a good impression on the kid.

O'Neill was welcoming him to the family.


	3. From Jackson

_(a little less than a year into his command of SG-1)_

The cavern they were dumped in was about a hundred degrees of humid heat, somewhere between a sweat tent and a sauna, with a tinge of eau de municipal pool from the steaming spring deep in the shadows at the back. Jackson had been running a fever since about ten minutes after the shaman passed him that pipe. Mitchell knew that Jackson hadn't inhaled, but he'd sucked some of the smoke into his mouth and probably swallowed particles of something even after he puffed it out. Everybody else in the shaman's circle had taken a deep chest-filling toke and held it, and none of them had gone semi-conscious and hallucinating the way Jackson was now. Maybe if Jackson had inhaled he'd be dead now; maybe the physiology of these guys was that different, or maybe they were acclimated to it, like he thought he remembered reading some tribes on Earth got to certain poisons. Or maybe he had no idea what he'd read or he hadn't, and no viable theory and no anthropologist to help him, just one very sick, very out-of-it teammate and ninety minutes until the ship was in beaming range.

One very sick, very out-of-it, very horny teammate. Jackson was lying on his back on the sandy cavern floor, sweating through his clothes and thrusting his hips up weakly in a pathetic attempt to rub off against his own fly. The aphrodisiac effects had been evident on the village men, too; after they'd passed the pipe, they'd rolled around giggling uncontrollably for about five minutes, then had a circle-jerk to relieve each other of the erections they'd developed, then engaged in an elaborate, effusive group-hug thing and passed out cold. Every one of them had a partner who stayed sober, sitting behind him in the circle and watching out for him, or witnessing, or who the hell knew what. Mitchell was supposed to be one of the ... caddies? designated drivers? ... and he was supposed to keep his mouth shut and stay in the tent until the ceremony was completed. When Jackson got sick, Mitchell opened his mouth; when the other caddies ignored his questions and requests for help, he dragged Jackson out of the tent to get him some air, get to their packs, their canteens. The locals outside burst into what sounded like outraged indignation at this breach of protocol, and next thing he knew he and Jackson were floating through the air and into this cave and a bigass boulder was being rolled across the front of the thing to lock them in.

Cracks and crevices provided ventilation and a few shafts of daylight to illuminate the space, but there was no way out that a human body could fit through. They had the stuff in their pants pockets and the locator chips in their bodies. No C4, no radios, no weapons. Just a notepad and a pen, a candy bar, a couple of Swiss Army knives and bandanas, some balled-up laundry lint, and Jackson writhing and mumbling on the floor.

He got Jackson sitting up long enough to drink most of the now-warm water in the canteen, then made him as comfortable as possible on the coarse sand, pulling off his own T-shirt to roll up to cushion Jackson's head, and took two conservative swallows of water.

Forget explosives. He'd kill for a cold beer.

So, bare-bones logic suggested that aside from keeping Jackson hydrated and hoping the _Odyssey_'s sickbay could detoxify him once they were rescued, giving Jackson an orgasm was his best shot at alleviating the symptoms. Granted, the villagers hadn't been semi-conscious and incoherent, and Jackson had bypassed the gigglefit stage, so recapitulating that part of the ritual might be a futile exercise. But there was nothing else for him to try. Once those guys had gotten off, they'd gotten real huggy and then they'd gone to sleep. Reasonable assumption was that they'd wake up, eventually, and be back to their normal selves. There was a slim chance that Jackson would too.

The thing was, the villagers had telekinesis. Each guy had gotten the next one off by looking at him. If Mitchell was going to relieve Jackson of that boner in the hope that he'd sleep off the rest of the drug's effects, he was going to have to do it the old-fashioned way.

_Crap_, he thought. _Crap crap crap crap crap_.

No sense hindsighting the decision that sent the ship off to investigate those sensor blips. He'd supported it, Carter had supported it, and it was Emerson's call. It was his call to stay down here. They'd had a nice day with the friendly natives and this planet was a naquadah goldmine if they could negotiate terms. Jackson had agreed that they should go through with the male-bonding ritual. Now Mitchell knew that Jackson's muttered "Third time lucky, right?" should have set off the warning klaxons in his head. He'd read the PXY-887 and P3X-403 reports. He _so_ should have known better.

Milk wasn't what he needed to concern himself about spilling right now.

He sat down cross-legged beside Jackson, took a deep breath. The snootful of chlorine didn't help his mood. _OK,_ he thought. _Through the pants. No big deal. First time for everything._ He moved his hand to hover above Jackson's groin, figuring a few firm upward strokes with the heel of his palm -- shouldn't take any more than that, given the state that Jackson was in.

He clenched his teeth, lowered his hand, told himself to pretend it was a seized muscle or something, and gave a slow push, like starting a massage; Jackson thrust up into it, moaning, so he figured he had the pressure right and did it again, and then a bunch more times. After about three minutes his arm was cramping and all he'd managed to do was get Jackson to thrash his head and groan in needy frustration. Jackson's hands lifted and scrabbled at his hips a little and then fell limp. Mitchell winced again, crooked his fingers, and tried jerking through the thick BDUs, and Jackson thrashed and scrabbled and made a definitely-not-good sound.

Through the pants wasn't going to cut it.

"OK, sunshine," he said, and unthreaded Jackson's belt. "Just promise you'll still respect me in the morning ... "

Jackson calmed a little at the sound of his voice, grunting and easing down, his mumbles shaping into something like words. That made it easier to get his pants unbuttoned, so Mitchell kept talking. Told him this had to beat getting beamed up to the ship at full mast, told him it was nothing personal, wouldn't be long, soon he could sleep. Sweat was pouring down Mitchell's face and chest, but not so much down Jackson's anymore, which was probably a bad sign, since even in this sweltering cavern Mitchell could feel the waves of heat rolling off Jackson's body. It was like the fever was doing the opposite of breaking. Not good, not good.

"Oh boy," he said, feeling his own eyes glaze a little, as the fingers he'd worked in through the flap in Jackson's shorts found his dick.

Jackson came up on his elbows like a shot and bent his knees and pushed with his feet to crab away, slurring "Wha the fuh who the fuh" and staring at Mitchell with no recognition in his eyes.

"Easy, easy," Mitchell soothed, rolling to his knees, raising peaceable hands.

Jackson collapsed flat onto his back with a thump, shuddered all over, and then said, clear as any day in the briefing room, "God, Jack, I'm sorry. I'm having the worst fucking dream."

A clenched, sinking feeling spread through Mitchell's gut. "It's OK," he said. "You're gonna be all right." But it wasn't OK. Jackson had gone dead pale and he was getting the shakes. He'd stopped sweating completely, the sheen on his skin no more than condensation, and condensation was bad because it meant his body temperature was falling and he was starting to get shocky. When his mouth opened with a gagging sound, Mitchell crawled up just barely in time to roll him before he upchucked. He dragged him away from the mess and shoveled sand over it with his hands, then brushed his hands off on his pants with care that he already knew wouldn't matter. Even as out-of-it as he was, Jackson knew when it was an unfamiliar hand on his dick.

It should be a relief that he had an excuse not to jerk his teammate off. It wasn't. He'd be the first to admit he had an immense crush on the guy, a not-remotely-sexual fullblown crush, and he'd be happy to swing both ways if he _did_ swing that way, but he didn't, and that almost made it kind of OK because there was no way he'd be taking advantage since it wasn't something he had any interest in doing, with anyone, ever, period. But this really wasn't looking good here, and the earliest the ship would be back was still a good seventy-five minutes off, forget how long it took for them to fail to make contact with him and investigate and figure it out.

Jackson was groaning again, and trying to roll over to rub off on the sand, and he kept calling, very clearly, for Jack.

Mitchell let him roll, made sure his head was turned so his airway stayed clear, let him hump the sandy floor. No joy.

"Jack?" Jackson's eyes were open but not tracking; looking at something in his head. "Jack?"

After a long, long moment, Mitchell said, "Yeah."

"Jack, something's really wrong. I think I'm really stoned. Really not in the fun way. And I can't see."

"'Sokay," Mitchell said, half in a mumble. "C'mere, roll. We're gonna try something else here."

"What's wrong with your voice?"

"Nothin'," Mitchell said -- then, flattening his drawl as best he possibly could, "I smoked some of that stuff too, did a number on my throat. Roll."

He pulled a little, to help, touching only through clothing, and Jackson rolled obediently, fairly easily considering the shakes and the crappy motor control. Then Jackson closed his eyes and said, "Just get me off, will you? This thing's like the popper from hell, if I can just come maybe I can sleep it off."

The weirdness of the request was no weirder than the clarity within hallucination. Jackson was just as altered as before; the O'Neill he was talking to was a drug-induced dream that Mitchell was enabling, it wasn't as if he was doing that good an impression. And who knew what the hell they'd been through together, all those years. Mitchell had been ready enough to do whatever it took. Teal'c or Carter would be too. O'Neill and Jackson probably had been, and probably had.

"You got it," Mitchell said, and tried again -- but the minute his fingers got where they needed to be, Jackson tried to crab away again, swearing a blue streak and then collapsing with a rasped "Oh god, I can't wake up."

"Easy," Mitchell said again -- at a complete loss now, afraid to touch him, afraid not to touch him, afraid to say too much in his never-even-_been_-to-Minnesota voice.

"Jack?" said Jackson. "Is that you?"

"It's me," Mitchell said, grinding the words out, feeling like some crazy kind of date-rapist impersonator. "It's me ... Daniel."

"Jack?"

"Yeah."

"Jack, just suck me, for god's sake. It'll take like three seconds, all you ever do is gripe how I never last in your mouth. I'll make it up to you when we get home."

OK. That complicated things.

Or maybe not. Maybe it only complicated things for Mitchell. Maybe he'd kind of already known what he didn't want to know. Maybe he'd kind of heard it in Jackson's voice the first time Jackson called the general's name.

He cleared his throat. "Can't," he said, trying to put some slur into it. "Somebody clocked me, hard right to the jaw, swelling's a bitch." As he was saying the words, a last-ditch idea occurred to him, and he said, "Gonna have to do it yourself. It's OK. I'll help you."

Jackson's hand flopped onto his thigh and scrabbled a little, as if it was trying to climb up to get to his groin but it wasn't strong enough to pull his arm up after. He groaned.

Mitchell suppressed a very different groan of his own and came back up beside him. On the next thrust of Jackson's hips, he grabbed pants and boxers at the hips and yanked down. He wrapped two bandanas around his hand so Jackson's skin couldn't tell it wasn't the hand he knew, then wrapped the hand around Jackson's wrist and bent Jackson's arm and moved Jackson's hand into position and got Jackson's fingers wrapped around Jackson's dick. "C'mon," he said, scooching so that his knee supported Jackson's elbow. "You can do this."

"I _can't_ do it, damn it, why can't _you_ do it?"

Mitchell winced, and it wasn't because of the situation anymore, it was because Jackson's face had gone corpse-pale and Jackson's lips were tinged with blue and his respiration was fast and shallow and what the _fuck_, what the _fuck_ kind of peace pipe did this to anybody, _fuck_ this planet and _fuck_ the naquadah and _fuck_ the natives and their _fucking_ rituals ... "Busted my hands up trying to dig us outta here," he said, "and you _have_ to do it or you're not gonna make it." His voice had fallen to a raspy whisper too. "C'mon, Daniel," he said, throwing caution and inhibition to the wind. "Just squeeze, just stroke. You can do it. I'm here. I'll help you." He closed his wrapped hand around Jackson's hand and urged it to move. He lowered his voice as far as it would go. "C'mon, baby. Please."

He would never know what the trigger was -- the plea, the endearment, the encouragement of his hand -- but something pushed enough strength into Jackson's hand to get it started, and once that happened, reflex response took over. He couldn't do much with his arm, but teased his cockhead with a few swipes of his thumb and then found a squeezing rhythm with his fingers. When Mitchell went to ease away, Jackson said "God don't stop," and Mitchell moved his grip down to Jackson's forearm. He jiggled it a few times to add a little up-and-down to the motion, and Jackson's eyes finally slid closed, and he finally gave the right kind of moan, and yeah, now they were getting somewhere.

Mitchell sat there cross-legged in the hellish-hot cavern, sweat streaming off him, way too many minutes still to count off in his head, and jigged Jackson's arm like a fishing pole until Jackson came.

In the moment, he couldn't look away, although he'd meant to. This wasn't something he should know about a guy he had to serve with, how his face softened at the peak of orgasm, the shape his mouth made, the tender anguish of the near-silent gasp. This wasn't something he should know about any two-star general's lover, the way he moaned the man's name as he kept coming, the song the moan made, the helpless love in it. But he knew it now, and he wasn't sorry.

Infirmary staffers had told Mitchell that Jackson glowed when he Ascended, that he became something ethereally beautiful, that it was like nothing they'd ever seen in their lives. The people who said that had never seen him come.

"Jack," he sighed, as the shakes eased and some color crept back into his skin and he went sweetly limp into the sand.

"Right here," Mitchell whispered. "Sleep now. When you wake up we'll be going home."

"OK," Jackson said -- utterly trusting, within his dream of O'Neill beside him, in a way that Mitchell had never sensed from him before -- and slipped into a peaceful sleep.

Mitchell cleaned him up, got him dressed, wet a cloth with the last half-swallow in the canteen to run over his face and neck, retrieved his own T-shirt and put it back on because Jackson was resting comfortably enough not to need it under his head anymore. He waited, wondering if Carter and Teal'c knew, wondering if anyone else knew, thinking how obvious it seemed now but how astoundingly well they hid it. He played with the double vision for a while, trying to superimpose the relationship he knew about now on the interactions he'd seen. He was only half successful. It was like looking at one of those pictures that was a vase and a pair of faces and was always both but could never seem to be both at the same time. He wondered how many people could see the two faces. He thought about how fragile the vase was.

After a while, as he sat alone with his unconscious teammate in the steamy silence, his mind roved farther. He thought about how some people were so deeply imprinted by an officer or a cause they served that no matter where they were posted and who or what commanded their allegiance over time, they always belonged, deep down, to that one officer or that one cause. He thought about people he'd known whose marriages broke up over it, families that became estranged because of it. He thought about Harriman, who'd served West and Bauer and Weir and O'Neill and now served Landry but would always be Hammond's man. He thought about Teal'c, who'd served gods and monsters and the SGC but had never been anything but Bra'tac's man. He thought about Carter, who served the Air Force and science and truth and friendship but would always, in her heart, belong to her father. He thought about how hard he'd been trying, himself, to be Landry's man, and how he was still nobody's man but his own, and how that sounded like something to be proud of but he had this feeling that it wasn't. He thought about how sometimes it went both ways. How, sometimes, the person you belonged to belonged to you too. How rare and lucky that was. How much it would give someone to fight for.

The next thing he knew, the sensation of beaming transport was tingling through him, and then he was sitting on _Odyssey_'s transport deck, pulling up as his body tried to complete the motion it launched into when he felt the transport start: to throw himself over Jackson, grab him hard so that no matter what went wrong, they'd both get beamed up. It was already that embedded in his nerves, his reflexes -- the imperative to fight to bring Jackson home to what belonged to him.


	4. From Vala

_(about a year and a half into his command of SG-1)_

He didn't believe her.

"There's no way," he said, because OK he did believe her, a little. He just couldn't believe it. "There's no _fucking_ way. They'd never be that stupid. They'd launch a full-out assault on don't-ask-don't-tell before they screwed around like that. Plus, c'mon, Vala ... _O'Neill_?"

He was sitting cross-legged on the floor of her quarters, leaning back against the side of her bed. She was stretched across it, on her back, her head hanging upside-down by his shoulder.

"Oh, please, darling -- how naive can you possibly be?" She bent her arm to awkwardly pat at his hair, and he gave his head a vigorous shake and shot her a sidelong Blue Glare of Death. She produced her toothiest smile and flounced on the mattress, settling in. "Never mind. If you weren't so charmingly innocent I wouldn't have had the pleasure of serving you this _scrumptious_ dish. That is what they call it here, isn't it? Dish? Why do they call it that?"

"This isn't funny. This isn't some tasty treat for you. A rumor like that could seriously fuck up the general's career, and if his career is fucked then we are _all_ fucked, so it's in your own self-interest to can it."

"Only it's not a rumor, you see. You've heard the rumors -- you can't swing a cat in this facility without hitting a rumor, wherever _that_ horrid figure of speech came from. Sam and Daniel, Daniel and Teal'c, threesomes, fivesomes ... I'm surprised they haven't paired the general off with you or me yet. If rumors could destroy the man's career he'd have been gone years ago. He is terribly attractive, and people start rumors about terribly attractive people, out of wish-fulfillment and projection and sour grapes and a dozen other motives, but _I_ wouldn't be surprised if he started most of the rumors himself. Innuendo has a remarkably useful tendency to backfire -- if you apply it properly it takes out the truth entirely." She rolled her head to look at him. "Do you believe that I've had sex with Daniel?"

"Not for a second," he said, taking her point. "But there's a simple and obvious explanation for every shred of so-called evidence you just cited. You can't just go around _accusing_ people of shit like this."

"I'm not going around doing anything. I figured it out and I decided to share it with you. I've felt this awful distance growing between us, Cameron, and I thought we ought to have something to bond over."

He ignored the mockudrama and responded to the genuine need he knew was underneath it. "Hey," he said. "I'm here. I'm not going anywhere. But there are _so much more fun things we could be doing_ than playing some game of who's-fucking-who in your imagination."

"I agree," she said. "But I'm quite serious. This is something you need to know. It's very dangerous for all of us and none of the others will ever admit to it because deep down they are still the team and we are the newcomers. I know you like to tell yourself that you rank me, that you are part of an 'us' that shoulder patch or no shoulder patch does not include me, and perhaps you are -- but not in this. They are guarding a secret _with our lives_ and they will never tell us they're doing it."

"All right. Fine. Let's say they are."

"They are. And _they are_."

"Aside from the risk to O'Neill's career and the domino effect if he goes down, what's the problem? So they have a secret. We all have secrets. We all _share_ secrets, with some people and not with others. I know things about Sam that she knows I know and nobody else around here knows and that makes them secrets we're keeping from the rest of you. I'll wager Sam knows things about you that Daniel and Teal'c and I don't. It's not an old-team/new-team thing."

"But I'm not talking about some mortifying initiation-ritual anecdote from your time at the Academy with Sam, or that she knows I haven't menstruated since I was taken as a host."

"You haven't -- " The TMI caught up with him. "Ohhhhh, I soooo did not need to know that." The rest of it caught up with him. "But wait -- if you -- how did -- "

"Hallowed are the Ori," she said softly.

"God. Vala. I'm ... I'm sorry. I mean, if it ... Crap. I don't know what I mean."

"No matter." Her voice was light, but wan, and she flipped over and put her face in the hollow of his neck, just resting it there, breathing him in. He lifted his hand and laid it on her hair. Sometimes she just needed to be close, to be touched. He understood that, because he did too. They'd understood that about each other for a long time. "This is a secret too," she said after a while, muffled in his shoulder, and he grunted, because yeah, it was. They didn't do this kind of stuff around the rest of the team. Only a few SFs on the graveyard shift knew he ever spent any time here, and they were impossible nuts to crack. Nobody except Vala knew how much he knew about wiring, and the extra steps he'd taken to ensure that the promised suspension of surveillance on these quarters was never unexpectedly revoked.

"And maybe theirs is the same," he said, quietly now, stroking her hair. "Maybe they sleep together sometimes too, and maybe over all those years they got sloppy once, and somebody noticed, and it didn't get buried as deep as it should have. It doesn't mean anybody can prove improper conduct. It doesn't mean they have sex. It doesn't mean they're in love."

"We should be. It would be so much simpler."

"I know. But we're not." He craned to get a look at her. "Uh ... we're not, right?"

She peeked up with one eye. "Not unless there's something _you_ want to tell _me_."

He smiled at her, gentle and sad, and she pushed up and scooched around and put her legs down to squeeze his shoulders and looped her arms around his neck and rested her chin on the top of his head. They both sighed. He was in love with his high-school dream girl, she was in love with her Ori-minion husband. Both shit outta luck. Maybe she was right about O'Neill and Jackson; that would complicate things, some. But not as much as she seemed to be saying. He really didn't understand why this bugged her so much.

"If push came to shove, he would sacrifice the lot of us to save Daniel."

"Oh, for -- _Now_ who's sour-grapesing?"

"If push comes to shove, he'll sacrifice the galaxy."

"You've spent how much time in the same room? A few hours? You're good, honeybunch, but you're not that good."

"But I am," she said. "And you know I am."

He did, and she was. He'd never known anyone else with her knack for reading people. It was a survival trait and an acquired skill and maybe a little something left over from the hellish decades of occupation by a snake, but it was raw, instinctive ability most of all. A talent, maybe even a gift. Add her understanding of subterfuge and duplicity, and she had a dead bead on the bad guys. It was one of her strengths, and he was getting tired of watching Jackson strip it away from her, hypocritical rant after self-righteous scolding after condescending praise that was even harder to stomach. Vala was the easiest person in the world to read -- she only pissed Jackson off because she was the one thing he could never learn how to read -- and if you really looked at her, really listened to her, she was one of the most truthful people you'd ever meet. And one of the sharpest. Whatever she'd sniffed out, she hadn't gotten it wrong.

"So what do we do?" he said. "It's not like we can corner Jackson and say 'Knock it off with the general, you're fucking with everybody's lives here.'"

"'We'?" she said archly. "_I_ will keep it to myself until such time as I can astonish Daniel by failing to be surprised when he attempts to shock me with the information. _You_ will no doubt go directly to Sam and Teal'c for confirmation, thereby weakening your relationship with each of them by putting them on the spot regarding a topic they cannot discuss with you. Or, worse, you'll go to Daniel himself, and Sam and Teal'c will get wind of it and swoop down in fierce protectiveness. Meanwhile Daniel won't give up a thing, and you'll walk away from him feeling bemused and possibly quite angry with me."

Mitchell took a deep breath. "In other words, we do nothing."

Vala nodded against the top of his head.

"So you told me this ... why? Just so you'd have somebody to know this thing with?"

"I did rather hope we could laugh about it at some point."

"Well, I've gotta hand it to you, it is damn fine gossip."

"Scuttlebutt of the highest order."

"Dirt of the finest ... vintage?"

"And anyway the man is clearly gay now, he never responded to me in the slightest."

"I'm not gay and I never respond to you either."

"You're not gay and you do so respond to me and if you claim you're not trying to imagine Daniel and the general doing it then you're a big fat liar."

"I'm a little skinny liar."

"I knew it. Oh, oh! I have some new pornography on DVD! Shall I -- "

"I'm not watching gay porn with you."

"I didn't say it was gay."

"You didn't have to."

"Where did _that_ term come from? 'Gay'?"

"You're askin' the wrong guy."

"I suppose it would be a terribly bad idea to ask Daniel."

"I'll buy you a slang dictionary tomorrow."

In the end they played Vampire Rain on the Xbox until Vala assured him that he'd gotten one level past Teal'c, and they snacked on the food that only he knew she continued to hoard from the commissary because a deep part of her would never believe there would be enough the next time she was hungry, and she worked the kinks out of his neck and shoulders and he brushed out her hair and they spent the night on her bed in their clothes, wrapped tight against the mountain chill and the vacuum of space beyond the thin atmosphere above it. While Vala snored through private dreams, Mitchell drowsed through cross-sections of layered secrets and Venn diagrams of overlapping secrets and organizational flow charts of connecting secrets; and when he woke -- well before five, old habit to wake himself up before he was rousted, new habit of waking himself before the alpha shift came on watch -- he slipped out into the cold gray corridor and went down to the gym for a workout, and showered and changed into fresh fatigues, and made a fresh pot of coffee at the station by Jackson's lab, and went on, no differently from any other day, except for wondering whether that push would ever come to that shove.


	5. From O'Neill

_(three weeks into his command of SG-1; and the week before it ends)_

Mitchell had just kicked in the 302's afterburners when there was a weird frizzy crackle in his headset, a kind of sound he'd never heard any comm system make, ever -- kind of like the way his own crunching sounded in his head when he ate cornflakes, only artificially rhythmic. Then O'Neill's voice came through, modulated in some way that scared the crap out of him for a second because it was undeniably O'Neill's voice and at the same time it wasn't anything like O'Neill's voice -- kind of the way a Goa'ulded host would sound if he were talking to you over a radio that sounded like your own molars rhythmically crunching cornflakes. But it didn't scare him half as much as what O'Neill actually _said_, or the realization that O'Neill was employing some heavy-duty jamming technology to keep anyone else from ever knowing that he'd said it.

It was only about three hours after they landed that it dawned on him what a level of trust the admission represented, and it was another hour after that before he started wondering what in the hell possessed O'Neill to tell him.

To make Jackson's life easier now that it turned out he was staying in this galaxy after all? Mitchell was nowhere near getting the band back together, and all his fanboy wishes weren't going to keep Jackson from jumping on the first ride to Pegasus once this Ori thing was a closed book.

To slap a big PROPERTY OF JACK O'NEILL sign on Jackson's ass? Jackson seemed like the kind of guy who looked after his own ass just fine, thanks -- in that respect, at least.

Left-handed permission to flout the frat regs with Carter, and/or O'Neill's little way of putting paid to that old rumor? Mitchell and Carter had been good friends since the Academy; the only permission he'd ever needed with Carter was Carter's, he'd known about her thing for her CO since the whole mess started, he knew she'd been over it for ... hell, a good year now, and he had a sneaking suspicion that O'Neill was fully aware of every bit of that.

To give Mitchell something over him, something _really fucking big_ over him, to ... what, buck up his confidence? Mitchell didn't have confidence issues and saw no reason for O'Neill to think he did, and for all the implicit threat not to repeat what O'Neill had told him, he was pretty sure nobody would find the first shred of evidence to prove any claims he ever made about impropriety; used to be that just the accusation was enough to spork your career, but not so much these days, and given O'Neill's position and authority, the only career that would get sporked would be the Cam Who Cried Wolf's. So maybe it was some kind of a super twisted advance smackdown, some preemptive strike against _over_confidence, which yeah OK _was_ an issue sometimes -- like, _"You feel yourself getting too big for those britches, you just think about how you have the most career-destroying dirt on the director of Homeworld Security, and not a blessed thing would come of it if you tried to use it."_ And what did it say about him that it even occurred to him to contemplate that angle? Was the lesson to be learned that he could be as much of a twisted headcase as SG-1's first CO? If so, was the intended message "be a headcase" or "don't be a headcase"?

He mulled it over all night, tossing and turning, getting himself worked up and worried and then cursing the son of a bitch out under his breath and grumping into dreamless sleep. O'Neill seemed to have this little power-trip thing going, maybe wasn't adapting all that graciously to the second set of stars, was coming across as the kind of guy who liked to play headgames with his personnel. Most likely the whole thing was a mindfuck, just to see how Mitchell would react, as if there was any other way for him to react than _sir, yes sir, my lips are sealed sir_. For all he knew it wasn't even true, and this was a test to see which side of the regs Mitchell would fall on if somebody pushed him.

Or, he realized on his crack-of-dawn run ... or, there were secrets inside that mountain and secrets within SG-1 a lot older and deeper and more dangerous than fraternization or homosexuality, and whether there was a thing between O'Neill and Jackson or not, the general had handed him that because out of all the terrifying secrets it was the secret he could do the least damage by leaking if he was going to spring a leak. And _that_ was the scariest thought of all.

Three years later, when the Ori were gone and the Wraith were transformed and the two galaxies were safe again for a while and the Stargate and the space fleet and Atlantis had been disclosed to the population of Earth and same-sex marriage had been legalized worldwide and American military homophobia was a thing of the past at least on the books and O'Neill and Jackson were celebrating their tenth anniversary with a quiet civil ceremony as a break from the flurry of packing up for a move to their new offworld gig, Mitchell found himself alone with O'Neill and a cooler of Heineken on the deck of the Colorado Springs house O'Neill had sold to Landry right before it all started.

"So that little joyride we took, back when," O'Neill said, then slugged from his beer, dark eyes sliding sidelong to Mitchell and then resuming their lazy scan of the yard -- that habitual scan that cops and infantry never lost, that had taken Mitchell a year to develop in himself. "You ever figure out why I outted us to you that day?"

"No, sir," Mitchell replied, his own gaze scanning lazily. "Never did figure that one out."

"I didn't give you SG-1 because you got yourself shot down over Antarctica doing the same thing every other brave airman was up there doing that day," O'Neill said. "Or because you reminded me of myself, the way you fought back from an injury that would have left anybody else in a wheelchair for life."

"OK ... " Mitchell said.

"I didn't give you _my_ SG-1 at all. That was an accident of circumstances -- not even remotely part of the plan. When I looked at you, what I saw was the first guy I'd ever thought might have what it takes to catalyze the kind of crazy synergy my SG-1 had. Whether it's something you _do_ or something you _are_, I couldn't tell ya, but I was sure you had it. Then all you did was suck my own people back in. I set them free to follow their bliss, and you dragged them right back where they'd come from, to a place they weren't supposed to be anymore."

"Uh ... " Wow. What the fuck? What was he supposed to say to that, three years and three hundred missions late? "Sorry?"

"Nuh-uh. Turns out, you did exactly what I hired you to do. You wrangled the team the SGC needed for the operation it was engaged in at the time. But once I saw that coming down the pike ... well, after I got over being pretty fucking pissed, blaming it on Mal Doran and blaming it on you and shaking my fist at the universe, I hadda ... give you something. Something real, something ... critically integral to that team, _my_ team. Something you'd never find out from them, either talking to them or serving with them or even sleeping with them. Something you wouldn't know how it important it was, but you'd carry it, hold it, and it would seep into you, leach into your bones, maybe anchor you in ways you'd never be aware of but might save my people's lives. So I gave you that."

What he'd given Mitchell was his own acceptance -- of the situation, of the fact that Mitchell was It now. Not in the way he'd meant him to be, or so it looked at the time, but in a way he could get behind. What he'd given Mitchell, in his wacked-out headcase mindfucker crunchy-cornflakes O'Neill way, was his blessing.

"I gave you that team's heart, Mitchell," O'Neill finished. "Me and Daniel, that's where it started. It wasn't a team 'til Carter and Teal'c came along, and it stayed a team while Daniel was gone and after I got promoted out, but we never stopped being the heart of it. So I gave you us."

"The grain of sand in the oyster, huh sir," Mitchell said, envisioning not one but two grains of sand, grating against each other more than chafing the oyster, locked so tight that one pearl formed around them.

"Exactamundo, my friend. So why am I telling you this now?"

"Because it's over? This part of it? Because you'll feed me my balls if I suck them all back in when the next Big Bad shows its ugly mug? Or because of that promotion I'm not supposed to know is in the works?"

O'Neill's trademark grin spread slowly across his mouth as his lips released the bottle's lip and he swallowed his mouthful of beer, eyes darkly, lazily scanning the sunny yard. "Aw, no points for that. You know you're overdue. And my team belongs to me again. No suckability whatsoever."

Yeah, well, Mitchell knew that too. It hurt, some -- he was surprised by that, the razor twist of _you were just temporary_ \-- but he was happy for them, proud of them, and it was how the chips fell in the service. Sam and Joe and Teal'c and Ishta were going with O'Neill and Jackson to set up this dream colony of theirs, and Vala and Tomin were already off scouting supply routes and negotiating trade agreements in the souped-up, demilitarized Ori warship she talked the IOA into licensing as their private, independently owned and operated merchant vessel. There was no active SG-1 unit designation to suck them back into anyway; the SGC was retiring their number, restructuring the team designations to better accommodate the needs of the Earth Space Defense and Exploration Organization. So he had no clue where O'Neill was heading here, and the mild flirtation and sexual innuendo were kind of creeping him out. Landry with the freaky birdcalls, and now this ...

He said, "Real clear on that, sir. Unsuckable. Check."

"I'm explaining this to you because there's a big re-org comin' down. Bigger than you've been informed, bigger than any scuttlebutt you've picked up. Paul Davis is coming in to handle the administrative crap you thought was gonna get dumped on you as two-in-C. He'll also do the liaising with higher, deal with the diplomats, that kind of thing. Reynolds will be handling intelligence and internal security ... command staff's gonna be a lot more like a team than you're used to. You'll find out more about operational authority and chain-of-command in due time. What I want you to know right now is that you're gonna be asked to do the job I thought I was hiring you for in the first place -- but you'll need to do it for a whole shitload of new teams, not just one frontline unit."

Mitchell's heart sank. Recruitment and selection? They might as well put him out to pasture. He'd expected to do his rotations in Training, but this sounded like the college circuit, dragging his ass from campus to job fair ...

"It's not what you're thinkin'," O'Neill said. "I'm not grounding you. The military kids'll be coming through Special Operations and the academies, and of those you'll only get the ones who qualify in offworld-deployment training, same as the civilian specialists. Your job's gonna be to turn those people into teams, and how you do it's gonna be up to you. But it seems to me that active use of the gate'll be a big part of your ... methodology."

"You want me to get a whole orchestra together," Mitchell said, slowly.

"Section by section," O'Neill said, dropping his empty with a clink into the paper bag between their chairs, then leaning over to the cooler to snag a cold one. "And every one of them has to be a flagship-class unit, and every one of them has to have that magic synergy in its own unique way. I'm talking about producing the irreproduceable, Mitchell. Again and again and again. Taking a once-in-a-lifetime accident as a paradigm, and making ... "

"Snowflakes," Mitchell said softly.

"Snowflakes," O'Neill said, flicking his bottle cap into the hydrangeas. "Feel like growin' some snowflakes, Colonel?"

Those teams were going to be the forward edge of the human race -- the advance guard of exploration for countless star systems, even galaxies; the front line of defense against the profoundly unknown. When he'd shown up at the SGC and found no team left to serve on, the process of interviewing prospective replacements had been a nightmare. But he'd crossed a lot of bridges since then, seen a lot of water go under them, served with a lot of people along the way, learned a lot of things. "Yes sir," Mitchell said. "I think that's just exactly what I'm in the mood for."

They drank in silence for a while, the sounds of the party drifting out to them from inside -- Carter's laughter, a snatch of old war story from Hammond, Cassandra asking if they could pipe the music out to the back lawn where there was room for dancing.

Before the party could sweep them back up, Mitchell said, "So ... are you gonna hand me the SGC's heart now? Some critically integral piece of information I never got from serving out of that mountain, or sleeping in it, or dying for it?"

O'Neill flashed him a boyish grin before settling deeper into his lawn chair and raising his beer just shy of his mouth. "You _are_ the SGC's heart now, Mitchell."

Mitchell waited, and after a couple of seconds O'Neill's beer came up to his mouth, sloshed around, came back down, and his dark eyes slid sidelong to Mitchell again, and his mouth curved into a smile.

"But there is this one thing I was thinkin' you should probably know about the storeroom on Level 16."

Then the party spilled out around them in a tide of noisy exuberance, and there was cake, and there was dancing, and Mitchell never did find out whether O'Neill was pulling his leg.


End file.
